Meanwhile, lower-income countries on several continents are falling behind, pointing to the need for a more ambitious international effort to provide them with vaccines. As many have noted recently, in our interconnected world, no one is safe until everyone is safe.
Covid-19 vaccination programs are gaining momentum as production capacity ramps up, and as disorganised and tentative distribution and administration procedures are replaced by more robust systems. A task of this size will surely encounter additional bumps along the road. But it is now reasonable to expect that vaccines will have been made available to most people in North America by this summer, and to most Europeans by early fall.
As of March 15, Israel has administered more than 100 doses per 100 people, compared to 38 in the United Kingdom, 36 in Chile, 32 in the United States, and 11 in the European Union — and those numbers are rising fast. The rates are relatively lower in Asia and the Pacific, but these countries already largely contained the virus without mass vaccination programs, and their economies have since experienced a rapid recovery.
